From my point of view: she insisted on knowing, so I figured by mentioning the bank offer that she would get a sense of my salary range and in-turn value to another company.

Honestly, as someone who has an interest working with large data-sets, I took her remark ("who wants to work at a bank?") as somewhat insulting. This specific interviewer was not a hiring manager, but rather questioning me for "cultural fit". I asked how long she had been with said company and she admitted "less than three months," which surprised me. I really got the sense that her hating on banks was regurgitated water-cooler verbatim, because she definitely had no experience working for one.

As a young professional working in technology, I think banks present interesting big-data challenges.

A lot of recruiters are idiots, for one, and two, their main skill is in manipulating people, i.e. sales. The shady ones will always do what they can to get a leg up, including bad mouthing companies that they are not representing, I've had it happen more than once when talking with a recruiter.

That said, I work with other software developers who have worked for a few of the major banks and they said it was awful, basically, I don't think its bank-specific, but there is a major divide between a company that's primary function is to produce software and one whose isn't, and banks do not exist to produce software, its just a means to and end for them, so projects are managed as such and developers are treated as such.

> Are you actually flexible? Surely there's an amount you like. I would have said something like, "I have an offer for $X a year, but I'd much rather prefer working for you, so my minimum would be $Y," where $Y < $X.

And you've just pretty much guaranteed that you'll get an offer for no more than $Y.